Daily Application March 9, 2014

There is a specific kind of suffering that almost no one talks about honestly: the experience of knowing your thinking is distorted, but not being able to stop it. Your mind twists neutral events into threats. It reads criticism where there was help. It projects the worst possible future from the smallest present signal. You know something is wrong with the perception — but the emotion attached to it feels completely real. This is trauma thinking, combined with what TLC calls unreasoned distortion of judgment. And it is treatable.

Two Different Problems That Work Together

Trauma thinking comes from the past: the violent emotional twists that occurred at various points in life, left unprocessed, that have embedded themselves as characteristics within your character. They discolored your personality and altered your responses to the world — creating a negative psychic change that continues to replay in present circumstances.

Unreasoned distortion of judgment is different. It is the mind’s tendency to take something neutral and attach a distorted interpretation to it — one that is more negative, more severe, and more threatening than the reality warrants. Someone asks “Can I help you?” and the injured mind hears: “You’re doing it wrong.” That twist is not conscious. It is automatic. And attached to it is an emotion that then produces a physical charge — edginess, anxiety, erratic behavior — that feels justified, even though its source is the distortion rather than the reality.

The Cycle That Keeps Going

When these two elements combine, they create a self-perpetuating cycle. The distorted perception generates anxiety and fear. That fear draws on past trauma for confirmation. The past trauma intensifies the current fear. Scientific America notes the average person has 64,000 thoughts a day — imagine how quickly an injured thought pattern can infiltrate all of them.

There are three layers of pain in this state: defending yourself from the past, fearing the repetition of that pain in the present, and concluding the future will be worse. That triple weight undermines every attempt at balanced living. And it will keep repeating until it is exposed, addressed, and offered to a Power greater than the self.

The Path Back

The key is conscious contact with your Creator — maintained actively, because the more present God is in your awareness, the more quickly you will catch an injurious thought before it burrows in. Think of negative thoughts as enemy soldiers: catch them in the open field and they are easy to deal with. Let them burrow in and they can take much longer to root out.

Thought by thought, feeling by feeling — you change your perception of each situation by offering it to your Creator and asking for the perception God would have you have. You take your Creator back into your past and let Him reframe what brought you here. Every wound becomes a lesson. Every difficulty becomes a part of the path. And what once fractured you begins to become the very thing that makes you trustworthy and useful to others who are where you once were.